


Dr John Watson

by ElapsedSpiral



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angst, Character Study, Immortality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-22
Updated: 2012-04-22
Packaged: 2017-11-04 03:00:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/388939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElapsedSpiral/pseuds/ElapsedSpiral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Warnings: immortal seeming Sherlock with no explanation offered as to why, apologies for that. Some liberties taken with "canon".</p><p>Summary: There was Watson and now there is John, AKA my attempt at joining up the original stories and the BBC show.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dr John Watson

Back then it was smoke and smog, gas lamps and the thunder of horses on cobblestones. The house had stunk of cigarette smoke and worse; his hair had had a permanent kink from a hat band having rested upon it so often. The world had picked up speed, begun to move noticeably faster until it had become full of boats and steam, industry and enterprise.

He wasn’t sure in retrospect if it had been his favourite time. It was wrong to say that he missed the stench of the river or the sickly children that had cluttered the city, but the man he missed. The man Michael had recommended to share the property he had found on Baker Street. The man had made that time for him.

Even now their first meeting stood out vividly in his memory. The man, a Scotsman, had been orderly, neat, square. No limb or hair out of place or capable of criticism. His hair, a rich, dark red, had stood out even in the dim and dusty light of the laboratory, as had his green eyes, sharp and quick in their rather vain attempt to make any real study of him, hunched over a test tube.

Down the years he goes back to those memories, as much as he ought not to. As his studies of cigarette ash transform into studies of cigarette filter tips, he recalls the quirk of a lip and moustache by the light of the dying fire to the sound of his own idle and out of tune violin recitals. Still now he is able perfectly to conjure the smell of the warm, spicy fragrance of some imported cologne the doctor had been fond of after having lived on the continent. By the end, he himself had smelled just as strongly of it as the doctor.

His studies of shoe prints become almost useless with the dawn of the high street. His time in the lab comes to be replaced with time spent in front of the cold, white glow of a computer screen, testing codes, scripts and website security provisions.

He enrols in different universities through the decades to pass the time and develops a reputation for being intellectually brilliant and academically useless. He always chooses to study chemistry in spite of the growing urge to opt for medicine, a subject he knows involves a level of care and compassion he has never possessed and only considers to hear familiar terms and smell the reassuringly clean scent of alcohol once more.

With every degree he manages to become involved with one or two young men, it almost being inevitable at the old universities especially. A rite of passage, a fling, a romantic nod to the Greek -they enjoy his company because it is always so obvious that they can only become so close to him. He does not want affection, romance, love, care or anything at all, perfect for the busy and ambitious young man of the world. All Sherlock Holmes wants is a connection to the age. An anchor or better yet, a distraction.

He finishes his latest degree, chemistry (he scrapes a third having never attended a lecture) at Oriel, Oxford in the late ‘00s and it is seems to trigger other incidents. He has to leave digs and finds himself back in London. It is as the doctor always said: London is a drain, dragging all the scum right back towards it eventually. He is pulled back once more and he knows when he visits the estate agents’ website and later their shop that he actively wanted to end up there once again.

When he makes his visit he tells the estate agent to stay outside and studies the rooms as though it is just another matter to be methodically judged, questioned and mentally catalogued. The rich red wall paper pocked with bullet holes is now covered in a hideous pattern of palm trees. The fireplace with the hacked at, splintered wood which had served as a home for their skewered letters and correspondence has been replaced and is perfect and smooth once more. His primary conclusion as he studies his surroundings through vision that becomes increasingly blurred by tears is that there is not a trace of either of them there anymore. He signs the lease at a formica table, the refrigerator behind him humming dully.

And he knows; he knows quite well that that much is too much in and of itself yet still he doesn’t stop these incidents from unfurling. Perhaps it is this new century, this new millennium that has renewed his energy and his interest in not only studying the puzzling and the inexplicable but conquering it once more, unnoticed but impeccable in his abilities and his methods.

So he lets himself go. He buys a laptop, he hacks into the neighbour’s wi-fi and, his brain whirring a thousand miles an hour on the cocaine he bought from a dealer he found just ten doors down, he searches online using one word.

Watson.

And the results are curiously painful even at this remove – there is something about the ease with which he is able to find the children, the grand and great grandchildren. He finds a middle aged woman with a Facebook account filled with photos of herself and her now ex-wife in various states of inebriation, cheeks dappled with that tell tale permanent rosy blush of the alcoholic.

He clicks through photo albums that resemble flip books, the photos near identical, until he reaches one lone, blurry photo in poor light that acts as a marked contrast to those taken in clubs and bars. This is a home shot taken on a wintery day, and features a man – “me and John”, the caption reads. It is, he discovers, the only photo of this man, a man without a Facebook account which further sets him out as an oddity.

The moment that he allows himself to study the photograph he feels almost as though the drugs and their effect have been bodily ripped from his system and he is left considering the face of a weary, almost openly jaded looking middle aged man in sober earnestness. The stranger is brunet, appears medium height, his face is slightly rounded and his skin tone has a warm tone, the beginnings of a tan. He is nothing at all like his doctor but this too is John Watson.

After that, he cannot help himself. He spends all his waking hours finding out whatever he can about the man, hours stretched out by various drugs, energy drinks and coffee. He stares through tired, dry eyes at blurry and pixelated photos of the man on his old university alumni page and in private pages of the MoD’s websites.

That he’s a doctor makes Sherlock laugh constantly because he hates it. He is a logical man; he dislikes things that he cannot explain, especially coincidence. Whenever you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. But this is an unpleasant, ironic, ridiculous truth and for once he wishes that he could to refuse to believe the evidence of his senses.

Months later, the man in the photo is shot. It is reported in the local press. “John” is discharged from the army and again, as though watching himself from a distance, Sherlock cannot believe what he does next.

He makes friends with a Mike Stamford, worms his way insidiously into the man’s life for the sole reason that he saw the man’s name on an alumni list alongside John’s. He attempts pleasantries, buys the man coffees when they meet until they reach such a point as to allow him to pass a comment that he has a flat that he cannot afford to keep without a roommate, prompting the man to introduce them.

In person it hurts more. This man is not John Watson, he is a John Watson. His air is of a well educated, well trained man who in spite of that lacks a certain confidence and poise. He is bitter in a way that his doctor was not. He has a suspicion of everything, of people, of his circumstances. He grips his cane, a device his doctor only used very grudgingly on occasion when the weather made his injury flare, as though it is shield, something with which to alienate himself from others.

And yet still, he invites John Watson to live with him. And yet, still, it happens.

They both get their energy and their spirit back. They tear their way from or back to Baker Street, cheeks reddened and eyes wild, laughter ripping out of their raw lungs between panted breaths. They create a little world for themselves which slips below that filled with television, internet, social networking and celebrity. It revolves around these near misses and tiny victories against one bad person in a world of corruption. They fit their waking hours to suit their needs. They pile disguises and case notes and laptops and spare mobiles on John’s bed. They make do with Sherlock’s.

He is John, Sherlock decides eventually. He is a quieter man but when he speaks, when pushed, he is franker. He doesn’t glare or shake when told he is a queer, he simply gives a little embarrassed cringe and pulls him closer. He doesn’t laugh like Watson did, loud and pure, but lets out little puffs of amusement under his breath instead, breathed into cups of tea or hidden behind his hand. He lets his memories lie far closer to the surface than Watson did. In Watson there were the glazed stares out of the window at unexpected bangs and crashes, in John, the alarm is far more evident, far fresher. At night, he reaches across and occasionally seeks out Sherlock’s hand if it is not busy stroking the strings of a violin or thumbing through a book, and curls around it much as it had about the handle of his cane when they met.

It is his own fault, Sherlock knows.

He knows too that this is how he must deal with the matter. It is mere coincidence, a concept he loathes, that there are two. There was Watson and now there is not. Now he, and his writings, are gone. Now there is John and his infernal blog and his insistence that he, Sherlock, is brilliant. That, indeed, is all the men truly share in common beyond the coincidences and their bloodline. They fill Sherlock with a warmth, a curious rising, expanding sensation within his chest of pride at his own work that he lacks otherwise. He works on problems, engages with minutiae because otherwise he has nothing, just his empty mind raging like a caged animal, his drugs and his chemistry. He works simply because he has to.

With those two, he works because he has pride in himself, he has someone to induce pride in and because he is acknowledged, admired.

He is loved.

Now, it is petrol fumes and car horns, mobile phones and a constant drone of information passing invisibly between people and in the air above them. The house smells of chemicals, his own and cleaning products. He often arrives home to the smell of foods he had only begun to hear tell of back then, the lush, warm smell of spices and coconut milk. He eats foods that are the product of an empire that has risen and fallen in the time he has gone on through. The world is faster than ever but sat there, toying with his curry and listening to John contemplating their latest case when he himself already knows the solution, the food warming his body, the air between them and the tiny kitchen they are sat in, the world feels smaller than it ever has before


End file.
